HELIXTROLYSIS CYBEROLOGY & THE JOYCEAN “TYRONDYNAMON MACHINE” LOUIS ARMAND Prague 2014 Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com Copyright © Louis Armand, 2014 Published 2014 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The research & publication of this book have been supported from the ‘Program rozvoje vědních oblastí na Univerzitě Karlově,’ no. 9: ‘Literature & Art in Intercultural Relationships,’ subproject: ‘Transformations of Cultural Histories of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods, Canons.’ Cataloguing in Publication Data HELIXTROLYSIS: Cyberology and the Joycean “Tyrondynamon Machine,” by Louis Armand.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-539-1 1. Critical Theory. 2. James Joyce. 3. Literary Theory. I. Armand, Louis. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Cover, typeset & design © lazarus i.m. Donald F. Theal & Alan R. Roughley Contents Joycean Machines LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES 5 ABSTRACTION 8 EXPERIMENTAL LOGIC 10 TECHNĒ 12 Experimental Machines ENTROPOLOGY 15 MAXWELL’S DEMON 21 MACHINIC PERIODICITY 27 TYRONDYNAMON 35 CONTROLLED UNPREDICTABILITY 43 UNPRESENTABLE 47 JJ JD TV NEOTECHNICS 52 THE ROAD TO FINNEGANS WAKE 56 VERBIVOCOVISUAL 60 TELEPRESENCE 69 The Obscene Object of Post/Humanism WHAT IS IT THAT WRITES? 74 FACTIFICATION 77 NEURASTHENIA 80 THE UNTHOUGHT 85 The Gutenberg Effect REPETITION COMPULSIONS 88 THE END OF THE BOOK 92 BEYOND THE WORD 100 POST-LITERATE 104 From Symptom to Machine TEXTUAL MACHINES 109 HALTING MACHINES 117 VICOCICLOMETRY 119 VESICA PISCIS 126 BORROMEAN KNOTS 130 TOPOLOGIES 135 From Retro-Virus to Hypertext RETRO-VIRUS 145 MYTHOMORPHOLOGY 155 TYPOGENETICS 158 ALETHEOMETRY 164 ARCHITECTONICS 170 LOCI MEMORIAE 174 From Hypertext to Vortext JOYCEAN GENETICS 177 POIĒSIS 178 NO LANGUAGE 183 MATERIAL VARIABILITY 186 PARANOMASIAN 187 VORTEXT 191 Constellations CONCATENATION 194 MESOSTICS 197 TRANSVERSALITY 203 THE GRID 217 COMPLEMENTARITY 229 STRANGE ATTRACTORS 238 POSTSCRIPT 254 Joycean Machines* Mind denotes a whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life… Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness is intermittent, a series of flashes of different intensities. —John Dewey, Experience & Nature. LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES In the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein poses a dilemma for the concept of universal reason in terms of the in- compatibility of different experiential or language sys- tems. For Wittgenstein, this incompatibility is not restricted to the limits of our knowledge about other forms of experience, but is foundational to experience itself, and consequently to the conception of language and mind. Hence, “if a lion could speak,” Wittgenstein argues, “we could not understand it.” And whilst we may invent analogies to account for such a speech as a lion’s, there can be no analogical basis upon which any actual comprehension of that speech could be founded: what we comprehend will always remain an approxima- tion according to our own conception of language. In other words, we are confronted with a limit-experience of translation and interpretation. The same may equally apply to all other forms of experience, something which for Wittgenstein is exemplified by the very condition of literacy; of being with language. “The limits of my lan- guage,” says Wittgenstein, “are the limits of my world.”1 * Presented at Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, 18 June 2005, as part of a panel discussion with Donald Theall & Michael Groden. 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. C.K. Ogden, intro. Bertram Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922) 5.6. 5 A great deal has been postulated over the years about the technological conditions of something referred to as “artificial intelligence,” while analogous models of intelli- gence have abound, at least since the time of Descartes and the Enlightenment. The transposition from the body- machine idea to the mind-machine idea is one that has accompanied the history of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of computing engines and modern computers, and it is this “transposition” upon which the concept of artificial intelligence has come to devolve – a conception that seeks, above all, to account for a material basis of “mind.” Or more precisely, of how the interaction of matter can give rise to a situation of what is called intel- ligence, beyond mere computability. And yet the ques- tion remains, to paraphrase Wittgenstein: if so-called artificial intelligence were possible, would we actually be able to comprehend it or even recognise it? It is a notable feature of cybernetics, cognitive sci- ence and particle physics, that, at key moments in the recent evolution of their disciplines, a number of theore- ticians and practitioners have found cause to turn to the work of one particular “experimentalist” writer who, within the institution of literature, is not usually credited with having significant import outside the “humanities” or “applied arts” – and indeed it is a rare enough thing generally for the work of a writer to possess any such importance, regardless of literary fame or merit. And yet this is the case with the two major texts of James Joyce – Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – from which have been derived: the name for the fundamental constituent of the nucleon (Murray Gell-Mann’s quark); a model of cogni- tion (Daniel Dennett’s Joycean machine); a cybernetic conception of language (Jacques Derrida’s Joyceware); a psychoanalytical paradigm (Jacques Lacan’s sinthome) and the basis of post-War media theory (Marshall McLu- han’s Gutenberg Galaxy, originally conceived as The 6 Road to Finnegans Wake). And yet, within the various philologies, the importance of Joyce’s major works – in particular Finnegans Wake – remains largely at a descrip- tive, analogical level. This may have something to do with the problem Witt- genstein poses, such that: if, for example, Finnegans Wake is a text, how are we able to recognise it as such? how are we able to understand it? how are we able even to begin to read it? The history of Joyce studies reveals that this problem has in no way been overcome. Indeed, it is rather a truism that, in the absence of overwhelming interpretation, mediation or translation, Finnegans Wake remains essentially unreadable. That is, unless it is ren- dered as somehow novelistic, an oedipal drama, a human comedy, or according to some other more or less familiar analogical mode. But this tells us little about the nature of reading and much more about the institution of modern philology – an institution preoccupied with its own dis- courses to an almost narcissistic degree, such that it is not a question of whether or not Finnegans Wake is un- readable, but whether or not it can be read. And this leads us to the matter of accounting for the Wake’s significance beyond the philologies – of its very significant readability outside the field of literary competence. For in this con- text, it is the astonishing lucidity of Finnegans Wake, and not its obscurity, that most demands accounting for. The accumulated wisdom of philology, semiotics and the philosophy of language, has not succeeded in ac- counting for how Finnegans Wake may be intelligible in its own terms. Indeed, how it may be seen to affect by means of signifying-structures something like an intelli- gence. That Finnegans Wake is not a mimēsis of thought processes, but affective of them, in ways that are largely un-remarked – and this is because they pose an appar- ently insurmountable obstacle to any “reasonable” view of literature, if not of the relation between language and 7 cognition. And yet if Joyce’s text is to be considered readable at all, then something like a general condition of literacy must apply, even if this condition is itself unrec- ognisable. Or, to proceed further, if a condition of literacy, then also one of intelligibility. But what would be a “con- dition” of intelligibility, if not something which would also be commensurate with a condition of intelligence? This is an important question, and it is one that without which the concept of “artificial intelligence” must remain un- graspable – for it is indeed a matter of art, of artifice, of a technē of language, of the possibility of signification, of what we might call a literate technology. ABSTRACTION It is arguable that Finnegans Wake does not in fact re- quire us to break with existing reading habits or to invent new semiologies – rather it requires that we scrutinise the unexamined assumptions belonging to these existing habits and seek to come to a greater understanding of what we call ordinary language and “commonsense”: their function, their machinery, as it were, and the pos- sibilities available to them. For Joyce does not pose a language or thought of exceptions in the writing of Fin- negans Wake, but rather a general condition of language as such – and this condition must be generalisable across the whole field of existing intellectual habits for it to be possible at all. The fact that we “read” Finnegans Wake does not, however, relieve us of the responsibility of accounting for what reading, literacy and comprehension actually entail. Above all, if these questions appear to arise from an historical crisis in the understanding of texts – dating from the 1950s and 1960s – or even of a particular text, such as the Wake itself, this should alert us to the na- ture of the problem as having to do with both the most profound and yet trivial aspects of experience. Profound 8 because they entail the very basis of understanding, of knowledge, of reason.